"You've invited a philosopher, and the curse that comes with that, is you have to hear a bit of philosophy."

And as promised, that's just what Patrick Byrne, CEO of e-commerce giant Overstock.com, proceeds to provide. It may be the depths of January, but Byrne is bringing his own form of heat to the roomful of bitcoin insiders assembled for the annual "Satoshi Roundtable" retreat in Cancun, Mexico.

Nearly two years into a debate over how best to alter bitcoin's software (and still months away from anything resembling a path forward), much of the event's itinerary centers on the issue, or as much as it can before devolving into either acrimony or aimlessness.

Fresh off a leave of absence from his company, though, Byrne adds a burst of life to the proceedings. Taking center stage for a speech, he rifles through a brisk dialogue that equates bitcoin with the American Revolution and pokes fun at major banks.

"They have not internalized how much they have to change. You've shown up with a Ferrari and they're insisting on putting a lawnmower in it," Byrne quips.

This rapid pace of play soon takes a pause, however, when Byrne points to a man with his hand raised in an effort to ask a question. Byrne soon balks at the name. "Voorhees, the Erik Voorhees?" he asks.

On affirmation, what starts out as surprise quickly turns to reverence, as Byrne nods, bends at the middle and begins a short series of bows. "I'm not worthy," he says a few times in a sing-song tone.

Looking back on the incident some months later, Voorhees is still taken aback by the gesture. Speaking from the offices of his startup ShapeShift, nearly a year removed, he admits he'd never met Byrne before that moment, and that he hasn't exactly had much contact with him since.

"It was nice, I didn't know if he knew who I was," Voorhees remarks.

Still, there's an obvious shared camaraderie, one Voorhees traces back to not just their interest in cryptocurrencies, but the way in which they've approached advocating for the technology, often in protracted fights with U.S. regulators who don't see eye to eye with their philosophy.

And in Voorhees, Byrne finds rare company, as the entrepreneur's own battles against the government stretch back years, to a time when he was just a man defending bitcoin on message boards. But if Voorhees was an oddity then, he's perhaps more remarkable now in that he's remained, always a touch out of step with the mainstream.

Whether it's taking left-of-center positions on bitcoin's technical roadmap, how industry business should be structured to maximize growth or the nature of cryptocurrency as money, Voorhees remains the shapeshifting fox his company's logo enshrines.

Then and now

One of the earliest evangelists for cryptocurrency (his online posts on the matter date back to 2011 and 2012), Voorhees is now one of its most distinguished entrepreneurs.

An early employee at its first major startup, New York-based BitInstant, he later founded and sold a gambling platform called SatoshiDice that was so popular it congested the bitcoin blockchain before scaling was even a widely acknowledged concern. Still, SatoshiDice was not without its critics, including the U.S. government, who fined Voorhees for the unauthorized exchange of cryptocurrency for startup equity.

If that sounds familiar, that may be because the model is en vogue these days, with so-called initial coin offerings (ICOs) performing similar sales on an almost daily basis. Since 2013, sales of custom cryptocurrencies have resulted in nearly $4 billion in project funding.

"I wish tokens were a thing back then. I went through all that risk and all that crap," he says, reclining back in his corner office chair.

If that's the case, though, ShapeShift's new office complex also doubles as a statement on how far he's come, and also how he's always been a bit early to the future.

Complete with reclaimed wood tables, catered lunch for employees and ample room for expansion, the office is a living I-told-you-so to the naysayers who mocked Voorhees for being one of the few to embrace the idea cryptocurrencies beyond bitcoin had any value.

Yet, the growth of his company, which hired more than 50 people in 2017, at the time when many early bitcoin startups are struggling or pivoting, is credence to his foresight.

What started as a website that offered the ability for users to swap cryptocurrency without a counterparty now has five total offerings – its eponymous ShapeShift service; PRISM (a synthetic asset portfolio built on ethereum); KeepKey (a hardware storage offering); CoinCap.io (a data provider); and Arbiter (a stealth initiative).

Anarchist blues

But for Voorhees, the success has come with trade-offs. Namely, he hasn't been able to be quite as visible – and outspoken – as he once was.

"When you run a company, you can't also be super political. You have a target on your back; I have to censor myself all the time," he says.

For one, he'd like to be more outspoken about the relationship between money and the government, the subject for which he first rose to renown in the industry.

Before he was an entrepreneur (struggling or successful), he was a blogger, authoring long thought pieces on the nature of politics and money, and how cryptocurrencies, by effectively moving the tools for money creation back into the hands of the people, were destined to upset this balance.

And for all there is to manage at ShapeShift, Voorhees still tries to keep in touch with his Libertarian roots. Case and point, the weekend before the interview, Voorhees was supposed to visit Ross Ulbricht, the founder of online dark market Silk Road, now serving life behind bars for his creation.

Though he's never met Ulbricht, Voorhees likens his planned two-hour drive, delayed due to an abrupt hand surgery, to a kind of pilgrimage, one that acknowledges Ulbricht's influence in building what was essentially the first large-scale business of any kind run exclusively on blockchain payments.

"He's in jail forever at least until we bust him out. So, I want to go talk to him and let him know that he's not forgotten about," Voorhees says.

But if all this makes you think Voorhees has a bit of a fetish for oppression, he pushes back against the claim. A fairly new father, he says he's eager to avoid a similar fate.

"I don't want to end up in a cell," he adds.

It's the first of many statements in which Voorhees seems to see himself as someone bound to his beliefs, at once optimistic they'll be vindicated, but also prepared to accept the outcome of their adherence.

Mean and nasty

On windswept streets, this predilection is on display again as Voorhees begins tearing into the meat of the subject we've been dancing around, his role in the industry in 2017, one that was primarily (publicly at least) defined by his support for failed bitcoin scaling proposals.

Like many other entrepreneurs, he signed a statement of support for the Segwit2x software upgrade that would have changed bitcoin's code to increase its block size parameter. The backlash was shift, and without broad support, many CEOs pulled out over customer complaints and general in-fighting.

On the subject of how he emerged from that still respected – if voting on our 'Most Influential' poll is any indication – it's clear he's a bit bitter about the insinuation at all, calling it "totally absurd."

"What was most tragic about the year was that all these people who were on the same side and they agree on 99 percent of things became not just opponents in a debate, but like vitriolic hating enemies of each other," he argues.

Looking back, he's sympathetic to his peers, like early investor Roger Ver, who have largely borne the brunt of fierce internet trolling. To Voorhees, it's an example of how "mean and nasty" the debate got over what he believes was a well-intentioned, and ultimately necessary, change.

Voorhees, like Ver, maintains his position that bitcoin's 1 MB block size needs to be raised for the software to succeed, and he remains taken aback by suggestions that the events served as a referendum that found developers staking a different path forward.

Asked to retort common criticisms of the Segwit2x proposal, Voorhees is quick to tear down arguments that have seemingly become accepted mantra.

"Are you saying bitcoin was not supposed to be used as a peer-to-peer cash system? It's the sub-title of the white paper," he says sarcastically.

Still, he does seem to refuse what appears to be the mainstream consensus, that bitcoin is now an asset more akin to a digital gold. To Voorhees, bitcoin can't just be an asset class, or even a store of value, because it's primary utility isn't to be held, but to be spent.

"I've never confused price and utility. The only reason that the price should rise is if more people are finding it useful," he says. "Holding is a derivative use case, it only applies long term if there's something else the thing is useful for. In this case it was value transfer."

Sly fox

From there, the issue is forced further, to the point where it's perhaps too onerous to state the number of conditionals I use to prod at his preconceptions. But to this barrage, Voorhees holds the line, and over the course of the dialogue, his positions become a bit more defined.

He believes bitcoin cannot succeed as simply a store of value (and that better scaling is needed), that the rising tide of competing cryptocurrencies isn't likely to be beaten back (by any bitcoin advance) and that, this aside, bitcoin remains worth fighting for as it's the best chance for the cryptocurrency concept to be truly realized.

It's perhaps this last goal that seems to most motivate Voorhees and his continued visibility in bitcoin, despite ShapeShift's embrace of a more practical model that focuses on many protocols.

Indeed, if Voorhees proves nothing else in conversation, it's that he's perhaps uniquely able to see both idealism and practicality as two separate ideas to be embraced.

Time after time, he defends the idea that "magic internet money" can't be silly or arbitrary, no matter how many there are, going so far as to fight against the idea that cryptocurrencies only have value when measured against a fiat currency.

"If it wasn't, why would anyone be interested in it? Other than some cryptographers," he says.

But he remains devoted to bitcoin because he wants to see the world cryptocurrency unleashes sooner than later.

"The issue is that of all the work and effort going to build bitcoin today, if it gets surpassed or destroyed, it delays the entire project," he says.

The hanging wire

This intellectual game of fox and the hound now over, we retreat back to ShapeShift's offices, both perhaps unsure of what to make of the conversation.

Somewhere at a coffee shop, we decide on a title for the discussion – "The philosophy of change as it relates to bitcoin and cryptocurrency" –and soon after call it a draw. Though, there's a sense of disorientation that remains.

Looking at a twin pair of fox paintings on the wall, my perceptions blurs. Made of a million black and blue brushstrokes, I remember there's no such thing as color at all. The images I'm seeing aren't even right side up, they seem to say.

Voorhees stops to fix the picture.

A little to the right, a little to the left.

"It might just be the wire," he says at last.

Do I see what he sees? I linger on the way out, stepping back, changing perspective, looking at the pictures from different angles. Stepping into the elevator, I resolve that if they're off, I can't tell.

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is an independent media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. Interested in offering your expertise or insights to our reporting? Contact us at news@coindesk.com.

It’s February of 2017 – I’m sharing a standing table at a rooftop bar in Brooklyn with Amber Baldet, the executive director of JP Morgan’s Blockchain Center of Excellence, and I’m suffering from intense cognitive dissonance.

Earlier in the day at an event, JP Morgan launched the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, where some major names in the banking industry and the blockchain space announced they would all work together tobang out a private versionof the ethereum blockchain.

I had talked with Baldet on the sidelines about some of the cutting-edge cryptography being used to introduce privacy to blockchain transactions. The conversation had touched on cypherpunk culture and the priorities of transparency and decentralization, themes which, in my mind, clash on a fundamental level with everything the financial industry stands for.

After sharing notes about some people in the space, the conversation migrated to Blythe Masters, a former executive at JP Morgan who, among other things, is famous for conceiving of the credit default swap, that little splinter of a financial instrument that festered for years in the side of the banking industry and, by most accounts, caused the collapse of the housing bubble.

Baldet got an intense look in her eye. Masters, she told me, was a tornado. A tsunami. A force of nature. I could immediately tell Masters was one of Baldet's role models.

And that’s when I remembered a fact about Baldet, a very obvious fact that my brain, nonetheless, could not handle – she works at a bank.

She works on blockchains at a bank.

She works on blockchains and cares about privacy and decentralization and admires Blythe Masters and has pink-tipped hair and works at a bank.

And that's what makes Baldet undeniably an individual.

In the last year she has challenged our collective imagination about what the role of banks will be in the blockchain industry, blurring the line that separates the public and private blockchain communities, and thereby opening new avenues for collaboration and cooperation between the two.

On Baldet’s watch, JP Morgan has secured a reputation for itself as a serious blockchain innovator.

And she is the only person on CoinDesk's Most Influential list who is working solely on enterprise blockchains, perhaps because she is the perfect person to reconcile the apparent contradictions between two very different worlds.

She is a veteran of both the stuffy financial industry and the more reckless blockchain ecosphere, a technologist and product strategist and an anomaly in any company she keeps.

If Amber Baldet were a force of nature – and she may well be – she would be one found on all continents, as neither her interests nor her influence can be constrained.

How it all began

Baldet seems to be a rarity first and foremost in her own family.

Her mother teaches AP English. Her father teaches drama and directing at the University of Florida. And she has one older brother who found some success as an actor on Broadway.

Yet, Baldet pursued an entirely different path, studying political science and economics as a double major at the same university where her father teaches.

It was during her senior year, when Baldet was an intern at a boutique business intelligence firm, that her eyes were opened to the power of financial data.

In the office was a Bloomberg terminal, a computer gateway to real-time financial data. Baldet had been informally studying systems at the macro level for her entire life. But glowing from the screen on the Bloomberg terminal, she glimpsed a system that reached lives around the entire world.

"I saw all of this market data of the Bloomberg terminal kind of wash over me," she remembers, adding:

"For the first time I realized, wait a minute … if you want to understand more about why the world is the way it is, you need to understand more about this."

To that end, Baldet began consulting for JP Morgan in 2009 and took a permanent position with the bank in 2011.

She bounced around at the bank for a while, looking for a group that would satisfy her diverse collection of interests, which tended toward technical topics like machine learning and cloud infrastructure. Though she didn’t have a degree in computer science, she had taught herself how to code when she was eleven (her first project was a choose your own adventure version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer).

Then, in 2011, some friends who worked in information security started talking about something called bitcoin.

"We heard that all of our friends were investing in this crazy crypto-anarchist thing," says Baldet. "I remember watching and being like 'eh, that’s probably going to blow over.'"

Despite her initial skepticism about bitcoin, Baldet decided to find out if there was anything to it.

Once again, Baldet was confronted with a macro-economic system, and once again, she was drawn in.

"The crypto economy is really a confluence of political, economic and technological drivers that are creating something wholly new," she tells CoinDesk. "It’s fascinating."

While she began thinking about how decentralized systems could serve those in need, it was not until Baldet saw a presentation at a hacker conference that it really clicked. The presenter laid out a strategy for using mobile peer-to-peer networks to coordinate local safety measures in at risk populations.

"But this talk made me think about how we could help humans who aren’t hackers or revolutionaries and just want to survive in today’s world.."

'A little Amber special'

After that, Baldet began looking for opportunities at JP Morgan to work on bitcoin-related projects.

Eventually, she was recruited into a group working on new product development, where occasionally the topic of bitcoin and blockchains would surface."I would put my hand up and say I’m interested in this space and I know things about it," recalls Baldet.

"And … here we are," she adds.

Yet, "here" is quite a long way from where she began.

In the fall of 2016, JP Morgan released Quorum, an open-source fork of the Go Ethereum client, and throughout this year, the platform has benefited from a series of improvements.

For instance, in October, the team partnered with banks in Canada, Australia and New Zealand to build a new interbank payment network on the Quorum platform. And, over the course of the year, JP Morgan joined forces with the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (or IC3) at Cornell University.

As Baldet describes it at a JP Morgan sponsored meetup in December, the role she plays is part product strategist, part team assessor, and part communicator.

"I sit in the middle. I’m a product person that knows about technology. Depending on the community I’m in, I wear different hats," she said at the time.

Each hat Baldet wears is very much her own. And each contribution JP Morgan adds to the blockchain space bears her signature.

But some projects are closer to her heart than others.

Baldet points specifically tothe zcash partnership, announced over the summer, where JP Morgan collaborated with engineers from the privacy-centric zcash project to integrate zero-knowledge proofs, a technology that enables the encryption of transactions, into Quorum.

During the December meetup, Baldet told the group:

"That was a little Amber special."

The friendship

According to Baldet's counterparties, that partnership would not have gone through had it not been for the credibility Baldet carries across the diverse spectrum of blockchain tribes, including people very much outside the legacy financial system.

For instance, people like Zooko Wilcox, the CEO of the Zcash Company, the non-profit that manages the zcash cryptocurrency project.

Wilcox met Baldet for the first time in 2013 at Defcon, one of the biggest annual conferences in the infosec industry.

Baldet was there to give a talk about suicide prevention, a topic on which she had done extensive personal research, and which, with Aaron Swartz’s death not long before, was highly relevant.

Baldet delivered a data-driven presentation that was at once sensitive to the sting of the material, yet unrestrained in its honesty.

Wilcox, who had known Swartz, was in the audience, watching with approval.

"I thought it was a very good thing to do because it was not a technical presentation about computers. But it was a technical presentation about useful facts that were in need in that community," recalls Wilcox. "Afterwards, she was swarmed with fans. We just barely got time to shake hands."

In the years that followed, Wilcox and Baldet established a friendship over email and Twitter.

Then in 2016, they ran into each other again at CoinDesk's Consensus conference in New York City. Over drinks, they talked about teaming up to implement the technology the zcash team pioneered into JP Morgan’s Quorum platform.

According to Wilcox, he had already had conversations with other enterprise businesses at the conference, but none of them felt like good potential partners.

"I had the feeling that most of these conversations would not go anywhere. When we sat down and talked with Amber, I got the feeling that maybe this could actually get something done," he says.

Understanding banks

In part, his confidence was due to the competence of JP Morgan's engineers, but at the end of the day, it was Baldet’s character that convinced him, he says.

Wilcox, in general, does not shy away from constructive criticism, even when it is directed at his own projects. In Baldet, he says, he recognized a similar intellectual honesty and fearlessness.

"Amber was willing to call a spade a spade, and say that she thought most of the enterprise blockchain announcements were not going to produce anything," Wilcox tells CoinDesk, adding:

"She was willing to say that. But most people were very much in hype mode that year. That made me trust her a little more."

As the partnership took shape, Baldet took a role in deciding how the zcash technology would fit into JP Morgan’s existing platform.

"Amber wasn't involved hands-on in the development, but she was certainly involved in designing the architecture," says Jack Gavigan, chief operating officer at the Zcash Company.

According to Gavigan, it was Baldet who recognized that the Zcash technology could provide privacy for both the transfer of value on a blockchain as well as any business logic written into the transaction, meaning that the terms in a smart contract could themselves be hidden from view.

And that's a fix that many large, regulated financial services providers, whose potential use-cases all require a modicum of confidentiality, have been looking for.

In light of that, Gavigan continued, telling CoinDesk:

"That combination is very powerful, and we wouldn't have realized the potential for that if it weren't for Amber."

Fostering inclusion

Despite Baldet’s technical contributions, a few prominent voices in the blockchain echo chamber have made it their responsibility to discredit her as a mere corporate shill. And when those tactics have fallen short, some have seen fit to sexualize their critiques of her.

At a Women in Blockchain meetup this December, I asked Baldet how she dealt with the constant barrage of insecure rants directed at her on social media. She mostly just rolled her eyes and laughed it off. She knows how to navigate male-dominated environments because she’s been doing it her whole life.

“It’s amazing that she can thrive in that situation with a bunch of men shutting her down,” marveled Micheal Wuehler, who is in charge of business development at ConsenSys, and joined the December meetup.

But just because Baldet is battle-hardened doesn’t mean that every other woman curious to learn more about the technology is or should have to be. Baldet is very aware of the social inequities in her community and has made it her priority to do what she can to foster inclusion in the industry.

This does not just mean bringing in more female voices, she says. It means fostering all kinds of diversity, even the ones we can’t see, widening the umbrella to include people with atypical emotional, cognitive and behavioral conditions.

Simply put, "we need to be a lot more welcoming," says Baldet.

This is the message that she brings every time she speaks publicly about blockchain technologies, and in particular when she attends the New York Women in Blockchain meetup.

But Baldet does not have to speak about diversity in order to invoke it. The complexity of her character provides an example that is more powerful than any adjustments she could prescribe.

"She is non-role conforming and represents in many ways what blockchain represents for me. Accessibility. Intelligence. Fluidity. Collaboration," says Thessy Mehrain, the founder of the New York City meetup and a product strategist at Consensys.

As Baldet worked the room this December, it was clear that she made a palpable impact in every interaction. Behind her was a wake of admirers, who did not hesitate to speak of her with the same intensity that Amber spoke to me last February on the rooftop in Brooklyn.

"Amber is like a Madonna of blockchain," says Mehrain.

And if Madonna isn’t a force of nature, then I don’t know who is.

Original artwork by Luis Buenaventura II, creator of the CryptoPop website. Click here to view more by the artist, and to check out the official CoinDesk Most Influential T-shirt.

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is an independent media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. Interested in offering your expertise or insights to our reporting? Contact us at news@coindesk.com.

Jihan Wu may not have created the "BCH Talk" WeChat thread, but he was among the first to celebrate the formal creation of the blockchain for which the channel was named, making his feelings known on August 1 to the more than 500-member channel.

But then again, those in the messenger chat were already well aware of how Wu, the co-founder of Bitmain, one of the world's largest providers of bitcoin mining hardware, software and related services, felt about bitcoin cash.

In the days before the cryptocurrency had formally forked from bitcoin, creating a $5 billion network from a few changes to its code, Wu was a not infrequent participant in the chatroom.

Designed to serve as a forum about the new effort to boost bitcoin's block size (the rule in the code that effectively puts a constraint on the volume of transactions), Wu had already weighed in by posting everything from news articles to technical tools to advice on when users should sell their bitcoin in exchange for bitcoin cash.

In this way, the comments give nod to the central controversy surrounding Wu – his outspoken antagonism of bitcoin's developer team, and the influence he wields that effectively puts him in a rare position to wage such a public conflict.

Indeed for much of the internet, Wu emerged as the arch-nemesis of the developers working on the Bitcoin Core software for his views on the cryptocurrency's technical roadmap, ones that would not only lead to outsized scrutiny on his business practices, but grow to ensnare all projects and efforts affiliated with Bitmain's brand.

At points, it was hard to tell fact from fiction, or which was more instructive.

Take ASICBoost, a theory that aimed to link Wu's public stance against the group's preferred scaling path, Segregated Witness, to technologies designed to boost Bitmain products. Or AntBleed, a supposed piece of code that would enable the company to control all its miners, making them run software that would block the update.

As the fight progressed, worsening over the course of 2017, public debate turned to vitriol, with Wu often relegated to shouting obscenities at perceived enemies on Twitter, Reddit or wherever else there was dialogue.

It's telling that a sentence so inarticulate could say so much about the state of debate.

Two sides to the story

But those reading the above might be left with the obvious question, how could the co-CEO of one of the largest companies in one of the hottest global technology sectors be driven to public profanity? And to not only supporting, but helping popularize a competing software?

Wu, who declined to be interviewed for this piece, appears to want to say little on the subject, keeping dialogue short and apologetic in a mainstream press push this summer.

Yet, industry representatives who have worked with Wu suggest a nuanced explanation for his public perception, one deeply interwoven with the history of cryptocurrency itself.

In a way, they contend that he seems to epitomize two of the technology's underlying sociological conflicts.

As a native of China, Wu's public persona has been impacted by bitcoin's east-west culture clash, one that has pitted Western bitcoin developers brought up in a democracy, against bitcoin's miners, often business people, hailing from one of the world's few powerful communist regimes.

Like other founders and entrepreneurs, Wu, who has an economics degree from Peking University, is also predisposed to a fail-fast mentality, one at odds with developers who favor a security-minded approach.

The latter disconnect is one that has played out in high-profile meetings between the groups, whether in New York, Hong Kong or across message boards, but is by no means unique to Wu. Neither is Wu's involvement in scaling, which traces back to these early efforts by bitcoin businesses to lift its perceived capacity constraints, most notably the 1 MB limit on block space that can be added to the blockchain at intervals.

Originally viewed as a short-term way to prevent spam, its removal would nonetheless require all software users to upgrade and enact the change. Such a path was opposed by developers, who view bitcoin as a kind of opt-in sovereign money and have felt the change could disenfranchise users, and supported by businesses, who saw the limitation as a bottleneck on new users and funding.

Wu, however, wasn't always so adamant about a larger block size.

Though he may have been most synonymous with an agreement forged this year in New York, he was also a signatory of the Hong Kong agreement, a controversial 2016 meeting, the failure of which was, those involved say, the root of the bad blood between the groups.

Yet, those who attended the meeting describe Wu as someone willing to stake out a middle ground, at least early on.

But as the Hong Kong Agreement broke down, SegWit testing went on for much of the year, straining relations between the two groups, and distrust began to mount.

"Wu became more and more radical after what happened to the Hong Kong agreement. His position was if the devs weren’t holding their side of the agreement, I don't need to run SegWit," said Guy Corem, whose former firm Spondoolies-Tech was considered an early contender for Bitmain's crown.

The survivor

By the time business leaders assembled in New York this year, Wu wasn't just another seat at the table. Not only was Bitmain one of the few companies left selling mining hardware, but it owned three mining pools: BTC.com, ConnectBTC and AntPool, its largest flagship offering.

And the explanation for this was simple. While mining had become big business, there were few big businesses doing it.

From bitcoin's release in 2009 until early 2013 when it eclipsed $100, bitcoin was just a plaything, a toy for the ultra nerdy. But as it continued its rise, people started researching – nobodies had just made hundreds of thousands of dollars interacting with bitcoin, and others wanted in.

And once they found out that they could get in, just by putting some computing power toward verifying transactions, or "mining," it was all over – the race was on.

A slew of companies started up, selling graphics processing units (GPUs) to mine bitcoin, and as the price continued up, even more specialized hardware, ASICs, were created. Before you knew it, individual hobby mining was nothing but a cost suck. But not all the companies selling shovels, so to speak, were successful.

And these were just two of the more public meltdowns. The founders of China-based ASICminer actually disappeared without a trace in one of bitcoin's true unsolved mysteries.

Bitmain, however, didn't.

Instead, it became the largest bitcoin-specific hardware manufacturer in the world by not over-innovating on product and choosing to perfect their delivery model. For example, Bitmain's competitors now cite an innovation credited to Wu called "franchise mining" as a game-changer.

Effectively, Bitmain would guarantee that it would buy back miners if customers put up a certain amount of funds at purchase.

"It made mining much less risky for the miner," Corem says.

As described by investor Roger Ver, such acumen has made Wu's firm one of the "most successful" ever to base its business model on bitcoin. Ver goes so far as to claim Bitmain is the "largest bitcoin company in terms of revenue, employee headcount, customers around the world."

The company did not respond to requests for comment on the matter.

Even long-time critics acknowledge the success, with Samson Mow, the former chief operating offering of BTCC, a bitcoin mining and exchange service that's been criticized publicly by Wu, pinning the success on the strength of the company's strategy.

"They had a more efficient miner than the other guys. Others over-engineered and made their miners too expensive, whereas Bitmain made it functional and efficient," Mow says, adding:

"A slightly different direction killed one company and kingmade another."

Corem agrees, pushing back against claims that any trickery led to Bitmain's success over his former firm.

"Bitmain won over us. It was fair and square, nothing malicious. Nothing about patents; they were simply a better business," he says.

Information asymmetry

But if Wu is a villain, it's his handling of his influence on scaling where that transformation really started.

Often overlooked, however, is why it was necessary for miners like Bitmain to approve bitcoin software at all. Originally designed on the premise that all users would run the software on their own computers, developers argue the emergence of mining pools, like Bitmain's AntPool, was never envisioned. As all the miners mining together, they also vote together, essentially selecting en masse the software they'd run.

Direct democracy in what changes would be made to bitcoin's software, so to speak, had been replaced by collective representation, meaning miners now had power over decision-making.

Adding to those fears was that it remained unclear just how deferential mining pools were to the wishes of their users, or whether they could use their power to force an agenda.

On the ground evidence to accusations, though, appears inconclusive.

Mining pools like ViaBTC and BTC.Top, for instance, are often alleged to be "controlled by Bitmain," though it seems in practice they've made decisions that put their business model over any ideology (ViaBTC still enables pool operators to mine bitcoin or bitcoin cash, along with a slew of other protocols, as does BTC.top).

But critics, like Mow, take issue with Bitmain's practices and its relationship with customers of these pools, who have few options other than do business with them.

"You can say he’s a good business guy, but ... at BTCC he would threaten miners in our pool. He would say that he wouldn’t sell to people if they didn't leave our pool. If it’s a good ecosystem and we’re all friendly, we should be able to support software without fear of reprisal," Mow says.

And it's perhaps on this topic that Bitmain has faced the most damning criticism – that Wu doesn't quite understand the balance that needs to be struck between furthering an open-source ecosystem and promoting his own private companies.

Case in point for some is that Bitmain now accepts bitcoin cash exclusively for new miners, a mandate that has come under fire by some, like Mow, who deem the move against the free market ideology Wu is said to support.

Interestingly, it's something that Wu seems to have acknowledged, tweeting earlier this year that "open-source culture" is not only unfamiliar to him, but unpopular domestically in China.

Business today

But if Wu is the king of mining today, he might also have reason to worry about his crown.

While Bitmain is one of only two companies globally that develop, build and deploy mining chips (Georgia-based Bitfury being the only other present in three verticals), the same circumstances that created the company's dominant position could quickly change, those familiar with the mining business say.

Mow, for instance, argues that bitcoin's rising price is good for consumers, who are now making more than they were a few years ago. With this economic freedom, he argues buyers may be able to more freely make decisions based on ideology.

"Miner efficiency is going to be a bit less of a focus because of the price. It’s not about having the cheapest miner and the cheapest price," he says.

Coupled with that, the capital expansion bitcoin's price rise has caused has enabled new competitors to spring up, coming to market with millions in investment and alternatives that promise a more open-source ideology.

Others aren't convinced about competitors, though.

Jiang Zhuoer, founder of BTC.Top, for one, isn't phased by such boasts, arguing that even the $30 million raised by one new entrant, Haolong, is "too little" given the costs of researching, developing and prototyping miners. "In the chip industry, $30 million is not enough," he says.

Haipo Yang, founder and CEO of ViaBTC, remarks similarly in statements that seem to nod to Bitmain's success: "You know, building a miner and building a mining company are different. Selling is a very complex thing."

Still, more hobbyist entrants aren't the only competition. If announcements by Japan's GMO Internet are any indication, large public companies may soon come for a slice of the mining pie.

Then there's always the chance that one supply chain issue, or maybe even a chokehold at a foundry (Bitmain uses the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, also used by graphics cards and computer chip makers like Nvidia), could cause a blow to the company bottom line.

#Misunderstood

So, where some see a villain, others see an impassioned capitalist, much like Ver or Barry Silbert – Westerners who have funded no shortage of companies and offered no shortage of opinions on how bitcoin should develop.

Far from someone trying to corrupt bitcoin, they see Wu as simply a powerful supporter whose controversial opinions have been warped by misconceptions.

"He's misunderstood, especially on social media," says Yifu Guo, the creator of the first bitcoin ASIC.

According to Guo, Wu might not understand Twitter, at least to the degree other users do.

"Nobody in China does this Twitter thing. It's not a part of the culture," he says. "But the West does that, 'I troll you all day, every day,' and he can't handle that. He gets triggered."

Other defenders often cite the nature of free-market economics, the freedom and the frustration of permissionless innovation like the kind bitcoin provides, as a reason Wu is misunderstood.

"Jihan has been demonized by people who just make up bullshit," according to an industry analyst who wanted to remain anonymous. "If Satoshi was allowed to create bitcoin, why can't Jihan? If he didn't need permission than why does Jihan?"

It's not an unfair criticism of Bitmain's detractors.

But for all the permissionless innovation bitcoin was built upon, the space has become more black or white, more right or wrong than many could have predicted. And whether you're a hero or a villain depends from which side people are judging you from.

To bitcoin cash supporters who believe in a bigger block size, Wu is very much a hero, someone willing to stick up for what he saw as inequities and hypocrisies, and even better, put his money on the line.

With the advent of bitcoin cash, it seems the debate will only continue, this time with real-world results. So it's likely the conspiracy theories will continue also, and that the mistrust of one of bitcoin's most powerful people will go on.

According to Ver, that's merely the nature of the human condition.

"Why do people love to conspire about things like the flat earth or bigfoot or stuff like that?" he tells CoinDesk, adding:

"It's more likely the earth is flat than Jihan is trying to destroy bitcoin. He poured his life and soul into this for years."

Original artwork by Luis Buenaventura II, creator of the CryptoPop website. Click here to view more by the artist, and to check out the official CoinDesk Most Influential T-shirt.

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is an independent media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. Interested in offering your expertise or insights to our reporting? Contact us at news@coindesk.com.

2017 is finally over. The value of Bitcoin has multiplied by 14, and this is the first year that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies made it into mainstream media. What’s next for Bitcoin in 2018?

Price Explosion: A Brief Overview

This year did not start out as a promising year for bitcoin. Right after returning to the $1000 mark on the first day of the year, China cracked down on multiple bitcoin exchanges; margin trading was banned, which caused the price to plummet back down to 70%. Unsurprisingly, nobody foresaw the growth that Bitcoin experienced over the following months. In the first half of the year, the price steadily rose to around $3000; but that was when the madness began.

Over the next few weeks, the price skyrocketed; Bitcoin became a hot topic and it was being featured at least once a week on mainstream media. This frenzy continued up until mid-December when prices topped $20,000 on several exchanges. Many people in the Bitcoin community thought that this price rise was unsustainable, and a correction was long overdue, and they were right. The price steadily dropped back down over the course of a couple of weeks and has stabilized at the $13000-15000 range.

2017 was also the year where traditional investors started to invest in bitcoin. Although the Bitcoin ETF (COIN) filed by the Winklevoss Twins was rejected earlier in the year, it didn’t stop others from trying to bring Bitcoin into the traditional financial space. CME Group and CBOE Exchange launched Bitcoin Futures in December, which drew a lot of media attention and investor interest.

What’s Next for Bitcoin in 2018?

2018 will certainly be an exciting year for Bitcoin, at least technology-wise; major advances have been made to the Lightning Network, the second layer which aims to scale bitcoin for the masses. The project is expected to be completed sometime next year, which would enable instant and nearly free transactions. Schnorr Signatures are also on the horizon, which would restructure signatures in bitcoin transactions to reduce transaction size and thus, fees.

This doesn’t mean that the Bitcoin community can relax and underestimate other coins, however. Even though Bitcoin is the top cryptocurrency right now, there’s nothing stopping other coins from taking its place. Other cryptocurrencies are proving themselves to be serious competitors to Bitcoin – Bitcoin Cash offers far cheaper transactions, while Ethereum is proving itself to be a very powerful smart contract platform. Ethereum will also be hard-forking sometime in 2018 to switch to a Proof-of-Stake system.

So… Moon or Not?

The only right answer to this question is “maybe”. Nobody knows what will happen – maybe the price will stabilize, maybe we will see another 14x rise, or maybe it could collapse. Even though we cannot predict the future, some so-called “experts” think they do; here’s a list of predictions for 2018.

One of the greatest things about having true wealth is offering a helping hand to those less fortunate. A new venture, Pineapple Fund, is showing the luckiest members of the bitcoin community how can this be done best.

Pineapple Seeds

Pine, the anonymous bitcoin whale behind the $86 million Pineapple Fund, has announced a $5 million donation to the organization Give Directly, for its “seed capital for the poor” project. The donation will help sponsor direct cash transfers to people living in extreme poverty conditions in Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda.

The charity, supported by Google and others, is known for its rigorous analytical approach to finding the most impactful ways for distributing donations. It boasts a 91% efficiency rate, a high benchmark in a field full of organizations that waste much more on administration and fundraising costs.

Only revealed to the public earlier this month, the Pineapple Fund has already donated to six previous charities. These include Watsi ($1Mn), The Water Project ($1Mn), the Electronic Frontier Foundation ($1Mn), the Bitgive Foundation ($500K), MAPS psychedelic studies ($1Mn), and the Open BSD Foundation ($500K).

Universal Basic Income

Beyond helping the specific families that will be supported by the cash transfers, the project is also used to test the efficacy of universal basic income (UBI). Unlike social welfare and many traditional charity schemes, one of the central tenets of UBI is that it is not tied to specific requirements and demands from the recipients. This is meant to prevent people from falling into a poverty trap where they can’t try to improve their financial conditions without losing their support.

UBI was one of the hottest economic topics of 2017, mostly talked about as a possible solution to technological unemployment – keeping people from falling behind once robots take over all the jobs we have today. By working in countries such as Kenya, where the average Give Directly recipient lives on just 65 cents per day, the organization is able to test the UBI concept with modest costs before it’s implemented in more expensive regions of the world.

What other good causes should the bitcoin community should get behind? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!

Today, the founders of TravelFlex cryptocurrency announced, that the ICO of the project will continue until 12th January 2018 23:59 GMT. TravelFlex is a product for global travelers, based in blockchain technologies, developed by a Hong Kong-based company.

During this round, the company is offering to sell 95M TravelFlex coins $0.28 each for funding the project. Funds raised by the ICO offering will be used to develop the blockchain further and to establish additional traveler-specific services to facilitate the growth of traveling industry.

TravelFlex is a working coin and not a token. It’s a coin that can be actively mined and it runs on its own decentralized network, it will be listed on exchanges straight after the ICO.

Don’t be confused by the name Travelflex since the coins can be used for almost anything payment related, not just traveling.

According to estimations used by the founders, the amount of global nomads and travelers will be counted in billions by 2020. TravelFlex ICO round is now open for investors to claim their share on essential financial tools and services for global travelers, based on decentralized blockchain technologies.

TravelFlex offers:

ATM Card for global low-cost cash withdrawals

Social networking and payment features for fellow travelers

Escrow services for advance booking of travel services, like hotels

24/7 live support

Printable traveler-check alike TravelFlex checks

Mobile application for financial transactions and social networking

This investment round is a unique opportunity to claim your share on the next generation cryptocurrency. Most of the TravelFlex services are scheduled to be deployed and in full use by the end of the year 2018.

Like a lot of crypto enthusiasts, you got a shiny new hardware wallet for Christmas to store your digital assets, but you aren’t sure how to go about setting it up. Not to worry! This 7-step guide will help you set up your Ledger Nano S safely and securely.

7 Steps to Setting up Your Ledger Nano S

Santa came down the chimney and left you a brand-new Ledger Nano S under the tree! Hurray! Now it’s time to set it up and secure your funds, but how? Not to worry. This easy to follow guide will have you up and running in no time.

Step 1 – Read the Manual

Seriously. The first thing you need to do is read the manual. Many people have the mentality of “ah I’ll figure it out myself,” but we’re talking about money here. This isn’t some new gadget you got where figuring out just what the hell it does is half the fun. This is important.

Step 2. Connect Your Ledger Nano S

Connect your Ledger Nano S to your computer using the provided USB cable. You’ll be prompted to decide whether you want to create a brand new wallet or import an existing Bitcoin or Ethereum wallet. For this tutorial, it is assumed that you are creating a new wallet. Follow the instructions on your Ledger, using the two buttons on the device to select and validate your choices.

Step 3. Set Your PIN

The next step is to choose your 4-digit PIN that you will be asked for every time you connect your Ledger. I recommend writing down the PIN along with your recovery phrase (see Step 4), although if you forget your PIN you can still regenerate your keys using the phrase. If someone knows your PIN and has your Ledger, they will have access to your coins so make sure its hard to guess. Another thing to remember is that the Ledger Nano S will factory reset if the PIN is entered wrong three times in a row so be sure that your PIN is something that you will remember.

Step 4. Backup Your Recovery Phrase (Seed)

Every wallet uses a private key – an alphanumeric string that cryptographically proves ownership of a given wallet address and the bitcoins associated with that address. When you send bitcoin to someone from your wallet, the transaction is digitally “signed” with the private key, proving that you are the owner of the funds being spent from that address. With a software wallet, the private key is stored on your computer or mobile device. In this case, your private key is stored on the Ledger, meaning that ever gets lost you could be up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

Fortunately, Ledger has anticipated the possibility of this happening. The device will give you a 24-word phrase, all random words, called a seed. Using this seed, you can regenerate your private key on another wallet in the event of something happening to your hardware. Follow the prompts on your Ledger Nano S to generate your 24-word seed, and be sure to write those words down on the Recovery Sheet that came with your hardware wallet. Be sure to store it a secure location. Depending on how much you’re holding or how paranoid cautious you are, you may want to store copies of your seed phrase in different geographical locations. Let’s say your house burns down, your key goes up in smoke. Thankfully, you left a copy at your grandma’s house, so you can recover your funds.

Step 5. Download and Install Ledger Apps

Now that you’ve set your PIN and generated (and secured) your 24-word seed phrase, the next step is to download the relevant apps from the Ledger website. The Ledger Nano S can hold quite a few altcoins, but you can store whatever you’d like. All apps require either the Google Chrome or Chromium 50+ browser and should ONLY be downloaded directly from the Ledger apps page.

At a minimum, you’ll need to install the Ledger Wallet Bitcoin & Altcoins app, which will allow you to store, send, and receive bitcoin as well as a variety of altcoins. Ethereum and Ripple work a little differently and require their own apps (also available on the apps page). If you plan on storing more than four cryptocurrencies on your Ledger Nano S, you’ll need to install the Ledger Manager app too.

Keep in mind that your hardware wallet can only have four apps on it at a time, so you’ll need to uninstall and reinstall apps as you use different apps. Don’t worry though – even if you uninstall an app, your coins will still be there the next time you reinstall it.

Step 6. Test Your Setup

Once all of your apps are installed, you will want to verify that you set up your wallet correctly before you start transferring all of your holdings. To do this, send a very small amount of bitcoin or another altcoin you will be storing on your wallet. By ‘small amount’, I mean less than $1. Once the transaction has confirmed and you see it in the wallet app, reset the device. This will completely wipe out your wallet and reset the device to its original factory settings, which is exactly what you want.

After your Ledger has been reset, try restoring your wallet using the 24-word seed phrase you generated in Step 4. If you have followed all of the setup steps correctly, you will see that your wallet has been restored with the test coins you just sent safe and sound.

Step 7. Transfer Your Holdings

Now that you have confirmed that your hardware wallet has been setup correctly, it’s time to start moving your funds. This is the fun part and it really feels like you’re in the future when you are sending and receiving money all on a tiny USB stick. Plus, your Ledger Nano S will give you peace of mind when it comes to the security of your crypto holdings.

Did you get a Ledger Nano S for Christmas? Did you find the setup instructions easy to follow? Let us know in the comments below.

It's an ironic statement from a man who became famous without saying anything at all.

Steps from San Francisco's gleaming City Hall, the internet sensation better known as "Bitcoin Sign Guy" struggles with a microphone as he tries to recall the day when he boldly thrust out a yellow legal pad behind a sitting Federal Reserve chair and became perhaps the crypto world's most famous meme.

But whereas he made the decision to take out a pen on that now-infamous July day (going from idea to action in little more than 30 seconds, he says), he's less natural when talking about the particulars.

What was he doing there? Who did he work for? Those are the things the Connecticut native is "trying to speak around" as his first-ever interview begins. And his caution initially shows, on camera at least, in clipped sentences and careful wording.

"I really was not prepared for this," he says, squinting into a California sun.

Indeed, despite assurances, Bitcoin Sign Guy is still noticeably uneasy about his identity. A recent college graduate (from a university he doesn't name) and staffer at a crypto hedge fund (that we're told we can't disclose), there are specifics about his life he wishes to keep behind the curtain. And he's not without his reasons.

Given his claim to fame is interrupting a meeting between some of the world's most powerful people, it's safe to say it wasn't exactly well received by all. In addition to feeling compelled to apologize to his then-employer (an undisclosed think tank), he admits he was even escorted out by staffers, an incident caught on C-SPAN, too.

"They actually did apologize, but I'm not sure it was sincere," he recalls.

But if Bitcoin Sign Guy is unwilling to step fully into the spotlight, one topic lights a spark in the conversation. A self-described anarcho-capitalist, he's every bit the bitcoin believer the internet could hope for, denouncing monetary policy as an oppressive "instrument of statecraft" and declaring the first and most well-known cryptocurrency destined to resign fiat money to the history books.

Asked directly if there was a larger message to his scribbled sign and its simple statement – "Buy Bitcoin" – Bitcoin Sign Guy is more assured in his answer.

He tells CoinDesk:

"I view cryptocurrencies as a new monetary paradigm that's here to directly challenge the easy money created by the Federal Reserve. I believe this will have full political and social repercussions."

Man of the people

But more impressive than his words, written or otherwise, is his resolve to put them to action.

Not yet 25 years old, Bitcoin Sign Guy is not only buying bitcoin, he believes he's part of a growing number of global citizens in the midst of something that's never been possible before the advent of cryptocurrencies – rejecting the economic system they were born into.

The Venezuelan bolivar, the Zimbabwe dollar, he believes, are already "falling away into bitcoin," something he's convinced will happen to the world's weaker currencies over time. But if he seems to get carried away at times (we argue whether his perceptions of those countries are accurate), it's because he's already living in that future.

While he acknowledges he still uses the U.S. dollar (calling it a better "unit of account"), he estimates he now holds "99 percent" of his net worth in cryptocurrencies.

"I plan to hold my bitcoin long enough so that when I dispense with it, I won't be converting it back into U.S. dollars," he contends.

In this way, Bitcoin Sign Guy sees his actions in Washington, D.C. as less of a prank and more of a call to arms he hopes others will follow. A student of politics and philosophy, he places no small emphasis on choice and the ability of people to make it freely.

He tells CoinDesk:

"The sign was definitely an endorsement. Buy it, make the economic and political decision to take your money out of the monetary system."

The break-in

But if money and politics are intertwined for Bitcoin Sign Guy, we're soon given a stark reminder of how for some, it's a more practical concern.

Back at the car, Bitcoin Sign Guy and I are left staring dumbstruck through a hole where the right rear window of his BMW used to be – that is before someone spotted my computer bag, busted the glass and scattered sharp bits across the sidewalk.

Amongst the shards lie two books, "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy" by Joseph A. Schumpeter and "Anatomy of the State" by Murray N. Rothbard. Both, it seems, attracted little interest from the thief.

"Shows you how popular my political philosophy is," Bitcoin Sign Guy jokes.

Stuck in solace for my lost belongings, the quip hardly registers, and I barely notice when, growing alarmed, Bitcoin Sign Guy begins frantically fumbling for his own possessions.

The more than 7 BTC he received from proving his act to the Internet? It turns out the private keys to them are in an air-gapped computer in the trunk. In a twist of irony, the thief may have stolen a $1,700 laptop, but they've left behind a far bigger score.

But if Bitcoin Sign Guy is nervous about the brush with his financial loss, it's only temporary.

Before long he's on the phone with the San Francisco Police Department, pointing out nearby surveillance cameras that might be able to be tapped for evidence.

"I believe you were saying something about the state?" I ask, coming to.

"Well, I was going to suggest we hire a private eye," he retorts.

Ever the optimist

En route to a nearby police precinct, I listen to the wind rattle through the back glass while Bitcoin Sign Guy puts on a playlist to cheer me up. He's hardly dissuaded, even as his tank hovers just barely above 'E'.

Already, it seems, he's found a silver lining. Though I'm less predisposed to it at the moment, before long he's talking up bitcoin's virtues to our cameraman, using it as an example of the cryptocurrency as a form of secure, sound money.

"If the bitcoins in my backpack were stolen, I'd spring to Best Buy, buy a new computer and install the old bitcoin software and recover my wallet," he explains. "All wouldn't be lost."

Maybe it's the droning synths, the jetlag or the thought I'll soon have to carry out that same purchase, but as we go on, it seems like Bitcoin Sign Guy and I are in a state of constantly undermining each other's expectations. He likes Fleet Foxes, I prefer Father John Misty. He's seen the new "Blade Runner" four times, I hated it.

"Would you die for bitcoin?" he asks me at one point. I'm unsure exactly how to respond.

But if I'm an underwhelming anarcho-journalist, Bitcoin Sign Guy can be an excessive evangelist. Back at the hotel, we're rearranging chairs for a second video shoot when the inquisitive visitor points out the bitcoin message scrawled on the nearby whiteboard.

Within a few sentences, Bitcoin Sign Guy is calling currency a "collective illusion," before explaining the gold standard and the dangers of fractional reserve banking.

"Basically, it's just the faith in the Federal Reserve not to debase the currency by printing it a lot," Bitcoin Sign Guy tells him. "Have you ever heard of quantitative easing? They just printed a ton of money, devaluing the money that you own ..."

On the B-list

But even if Bitcoin Sign Guy isn't able to convince the hotel employee to break the chains of his current economy, the day isn't done with its surprises.

We're finally underway with filming when entrepreneur and author William Mougayar stumbles through the door. There to host the second annual Token Summit, an event focusing on crypto tokens and ICOs, Mougayar initially seems taken aback by the scene.

Nominated in two categories of our "Most Influential," I have to break the news he wasn't a winner. And as I talk up the series, I can sense Mougayar, who meets Bitcoin Sign Guy under his real name, seems confused (and maybe a bit offended) by the selection.

We carry on small talk about the conference, its speakers and sponsors, as Bitcoin Sign Guy takes out a piece of yellow paper and begins recreating his big moment for the cameras. And it's not until then that Mougayar's attitude seems to change.

"Is that?" he says, putting his hand to his mouth, craning his neck and motioning to his friend. "Ooh. That's him."

Smiling and laughing, it seems, Mougayar finally understands, his changing expression an acknowledgement of what made the Bitcoin Sign Guy prank such a rare, uniting moment in a year otherwise defined by hostility, in-fighting and successes that still largely confound industry insiders.

"Nobody cared who I was until I put on the mask, til I held up the sign," Bitcoin Sign Guy jokes later on. A play on a line from "The Dark Knight Rises," it seems curiously apt.

Behind the mask

But as we continue, it seems there's tension between the man and his mask, between a young idealist who wants to make a mark and the symbol that will forever bear his likeness.

Since the hearing, Bitcoin Sign Guy has donned that July day's outfit (complete with seersucker blazer and pink tie) a few times, helping raise money for what he considers worthy causes (advocacy group Coin Center and ICO project Tezos).

But still, he remains anonymous, in name. And because of that, there are downsides, like Mougayar's rebuff for one. It cuts to the core of one of the struggles of the day: whether or when Bitcoin Sign Guy will ever reveal himself.

He even seems to go back and forth on the interview we're conducting, and how it will boost the profile of his already plentiful online persona.

"I just am cautious," he says. "I should have prepared more for this interview, but I guess my main concern is that I would share these views, and they would be ridiculous."

It's a rare moment of self-doubt for someone who throughout the day has remained consistent in espousing and affirming his ideals. But then again, reflection seems on tap as the wind whines again through the window glass.

"I just don't want to be cornered for the rest of my life as the guy," he says.

That's the trade-off, it seems, for the artist and his creation.

But as we trade goodbyes, there's one thing I'm convinced of – if Bitcoin Sign Guy is conflicted about his past, he's also the living symbol of its bright future, the embodiment of an audacious next generation of crypto enthusiasts just now emerging and a reminder of the struggles and sacrifices yet in store.

Want more? Hear Bitcoin Sign Guy's story in his own words:

VIDEO

Original artwork by Luis Buenaventura II, creator of the CryptoPop website. Click here to view more by the artist, and to check out the official CoinDesk Most Influential T-shirt.

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is an independent media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. Interested in offering your expertise or insights to our reporting? Contact us at news@coindesk.com.

And with a disruptive technology like cryptocurrency, sometimes even negative comments from a powerful incumbent can be bullish signals ... particularly if they're coming out of the right mouth, like the big one belonging to Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the U.S.

A banker lionized in the business press for his leadership during the 2008 global financial crisis; the personification of the Wall Street elite; the bellwether of the Davoisie, with a Queens accent like President Trump's (and a similar penchant for making provocative, headline-grabbing statements), Dimon regularly talked smack about bitcoin in public appearances throughout the fall of 2017.

Yet, while bitcoin's price dipped right after he dropped that f-bomb (part of a one-two punch to the market, along with China's crackdowns on initial coin offerings and exchanges), the largest cryptocurrency by market cap quickly resumed its climb.

In subsequent talks, Dimon called bitcoin "worthless." He warned that the run-up "will end badly," and that "stupid" buyers (including his daughter) would "pay the price." And, he predicted, governments will eventually shut bitcoin down.

All while, of course, paying the obligatory lip service to blockchain technology as something separable from the currency.

Still, the bitcoin price kept rising into five-digit territory, where it remained even after a sharp late-December correction.

For some, this confluence of events was a classic example of the Streisand effect – the phenomenon where attempts to suppress something only bring it more attention.

"I don't think there was much of a better advertisement for bitcoin than for Jamie Dimon to be denigrating it on public television," says Daniel Masters, a former JPMorgan commodities trader who defected to the crypto space and now runs Global Advisors Bitcoin Investment Fund PLC in the U.K.

Masters added:

"If he was aiming to undermine the digital asset world, he actually effected the exact opposite."

Conversation starter

To be sure, correlation is not the same thing as causation, so it's hard to draw a straight line from Dimon's remarks to the rally of late 2017.

"I assume that most of the institutional traders involved in cryptocurrency trading today, in late December, were already well aware of what cryptocurrencies were before, during and after his comments," says Tim Swanson, director of research at Post Oak Labs. "But since none of the exchanges publish any public data on the demographics of their users, it's really going to be guesswork as to proving his comments brought in new buyers."

But this much is clear: Dimon got Wall Street talking about crypto this year.

"It made everybody research bitcoin over their weekend, and I think they realized that there's something here," says Matthew Rozak, co-founder of the tech startup Bloq and founding partner at Tally Capital, adding:

"Bitcoin and crypto, just by its nature, is this shiny new object that lends itself well to speculation and trading and all the form factors that Wall Street loves."

And among Dimon's C-level peers, not all the talk was reflexively negative.

For example, Lloyd Blankfein, Dimon's counterpart at Goldman Sachs (another surviving icon of the 2008 crisis), expressed a more open-minded view in early October on Twitter.

"Still thinking about #Bitcoin," he wrote. "No conclusion – not endorsing/rejecting. Know that folks also were skeptical when paper money displaced gold."

Curious Lloyd

For Caitlin Long, who, like Masters, is a bitcoin aficionado and Wall Street escapee, such a nuanced response was a reassuring sign.

"Lloyd was publicly saying, 'hey, don't dismiss this so quickly,'" Long, the president and chairman of Symbiont Inc., a vendor of enterprise blockchain technology, says.

Dimon's comments "touched a nerve for me, personally," she continued. Four years earlier, when she was running the pension business at Morgan Stanley – but dabbling in bitcoin on the side – "I had to keep my head down because I was afraid I would get fired. I knew there were a lot of people within the compliance department of the bank who were steadfastly opposed to this."

So when Dimon said he'd fire a JPMorgan employee "in a second" for trading bitcoin, her worst fears about Wall Street's stance toward crypto were confirmed.

"When Jamie Dimon slammed that door shut and threatened to fire people, what message was he sending to employees about curiosity and innovation?" Long contends.

In that light, for Blankfein to merely refrain from judgment was "quite a statement from Goldman," she says. It was "a signal to employees that it's okay to explore the new and different."

Supporting that take – although Blankfein later indicated unease with bitcoin's volatility – by late December rumors had resurfaced that Goldman was forming a bitcoin trading desk.

This time is different?

Of course, Dimon has made similar remarks in prior years, but conditions have changed since, for instance, the time he predicted bitcoin's demise in November 2015.

For one thing, the price of bitcoin had climbed more than tenfold since then, to over $4,000 the day of the "fraud" remark. And the entire market capitalization (admittedly, an imperfect indicator) of all cryptocurrencies had swelled from $5 billion to $141 billion over the same period, according to CoinMarketCap.

But perhaps more importantly, the worldwide cryptocurrency community had blossomed, volatile as ever but resilient and, some say, increasingly self-reliant.

"You've created thousands of bitcoin and ethereum millionaires. When they do what they've done in the digital asset universe, they do not go back," Masters says. "People are not cashing out these digital assets back into fiat money," but rather investing in new blockchain projects through initial coin offerings (ICOs).

"We have this incredible richness and diversity now in the digital asset space," Masters continues. "This space is jettisoning from the legacy system completely."

To Masters, it is unsurprising that Dimon would be so hostile to a technology designed to make the legacy financial system redundant.

"This guy is a dinosaur living in the old world," Masters says of his onetime boss, adding:

"He has a very large walled garden, he's paid [tens of billions] in fines to maintain his walled garden and he does not want anyone to remake the financial industry, and that's what's happening."

In this interpretation (no doubt shared by many bitcoiners), Dimon and the other "Masters of the Universe" who cast doubt on cryptocurrency, such as Allianz's Mohamed El-Erian, are the financial services industry's equivalent of cab drivers lobbying their local governments to ban Uber.

"These people have made and continue to make a lot of money from a captive audience in a very clunky old system," Masters says.

The enterprise strikes back

But perhaps this is uncharitable. Because, for a centuries-old institution with sprawling global operations cobbled together from countless mergers, JPMorgan Chase is fairly innovative.

From partnering with nimbler fintech startups to using APIs to share data more securely, to embracing public cloud computing, JPMorgan has taken bold steps on Dimon's watch – again, "bold" by the standards of lumbering, heavily regulated megabanks.

And of course it's building Quorum, a private blockchain for smart contracts, in a project led by another of CoinDesk’s Most Influential People in Blockchain of 2017, Amber Baldet.

"It's not as if Chase doesn't hedge their bets incredibly well," says Sam Maule, the managing partner for North America at the fintech consulting firm 11FS.

But there may be a simpler explanation for Dimon's bitcoin-bashing than simple reactionary Luddism or rent-seeking.

'Triggered'

At the Money2020 conference in October, Baldet, JPMorgan's blockchain program lead, was asked about her CEO's constant disparaging of the same currency that spawned the technology she's working on.

She explained it in very human terms.

"What Jamie's responding to is people on panels who continually ask him, 'what do you think of bitcoin?' at an outsized rate to what else is happening out there in the macroeconomic world of finance," Baldet says. "It can just be a little triggering to be asked the same thing over and over."

And speaking of triggering, the apoplectic reactions on social media and online forums of some in the bitcoin community to Dimon's remarks suggest that even trolls can get trolled.

It "shows how much bitcoiners really do care about outside perception, especially from large banks," Swanson says. "Because deep down bitcoiners want external validation for their worldview, and they can only rely on retail investors for so long. The big surge, to come, is if/when regulated [financial institutions] start trading coins like they trade other wares."

JPMorgan would not make Dimon available for interviews for this report, but he gets the last word here. Because lost in all the lapel-grabbing, black-and-white headlines were a couple surprisingly nuanced and (for him) appreciative comments about bitcoin.

At the Delivering Alpha conference in September, just before saying that the currency was good for nothing but speculation for people living the U.S., he admitted:

"If you were in Venezuela or Ecuador or North Korea, you're better off, probably, using bitcoin than using their currency."

Wait, what was that? Digital currency empowering people living under oppressive regimes?

Original artwork by Luis Buenaventura II, creator of the CryptoPop website. Click here to view more by the artist, and to check out the official CoinDesk Most Influential T-shirt.

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is an independent media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. Interested in offering your expertise or insights to our reporting? Contact us at news@coindesk.com.

On the sun-streaked streets of San Mateo, California, the man affectionately known as "Satoshi lite" feeds the meter before walking up to the front of the famed early-stage startup incubator Boost VC. The locked glass doors seem not to care they’re reflecting the face of litecoin, the $12 billion cryptocurrency that’s now one of the world’s oldest, largest and most well-known.

Leaning back in one of the many chairs that dot the complex, Lee is slower to respond, at last referring to a tweet in which he lauded "crypto collectibles" as a worthy blockchain use case.

It’s the beginning of a pattern with Lee, whose every real-life comment seems to have a digital analog. Over the course of two interviews during the day (one with CoinDesk, the other with Draper), he’ll continue to refer often to social media, where his nearly 500,000 followers have made him one of the most beloved figures in crypto.

But his digital fandom has been all the more remarkable as its grown during a time when the technology’s pantheon of early adopters has largely been torn down, tarred and feathered, or if nothing else, exited the year all the worse for engaging in such public tactics themselves.

Even during the thick of 2017’s scaling debate, with bitcoin supporters at arms in a daily message board war over the technology’s roadmap, Lee seemed to rise above the fray.

That’s not to say he demurred or watered down his opinions – far from it.

Whether he was arguing Ripple isn’t a cryptocurrency, trolling bitcoin's rival blockchain bitcoin cash or speaking out against speculation in the litecoin market (he would go on to sell all of his holdings), Lee appeared to walk some unseen tightrope of taste.

But if there’s some magic combination, some code of blockchain ethics he’s tapped into, Lee isn’t forthcoming with his secret. Asked just how he gets away with such an outspoken persona, he still seems to have the right answer.

"I get a lot of abuse, too," he says.

Origin story

Spend some time with Lee, though, and it’s clear what’s endeared him to so many – his clarity of expression, his modesty and his belief in the virtue of work.

Walking past walls lined with Draper’s favorite superhero slogans, it’s perhaps easy to think of these attributes as Lee’s own superpowers. And if that’s the case, Lee’s origin story begins at the end of 2016, when he finally found a purpose for litecoin, a project he seems to have started absentmindedly in 2011 and later, almost abandoned.

Created while he was working as a software engineer at Google, Lee made litecoin by simply copying bitcoin’s code (with some slight modifications designed for merchants).

But if litecoin caught on in those early days, it wasn’t for its tech. Widely heralded as the "silver to bitcoin’s gold," it was largely the marketing that cemented both litecoin and Lee, as the slogan arguably succeeded better than any targeted toward promoting cryptocurrency (at once defining both the project and its relation to bitcoin).

So, as bitcoin rose to $1,000 at the height of its inaugural mega-bubble in 2013, litecoin followed suit, closely tracking the movement with its own rise to near-$50 a pop.

From there, though, Lee’s magic touch was largely allocated to other projects. Soon after, he would join San Francisco-based bitcoin startup Coinbase, a business that would become so consistent as to have gained recognition as the "blue chip" of the world’s most volatile market.

By mid-2015, litecoin’s future was unclear, and its market, almost inactive.

"I definitely wasn’t paying a lot of attention to [litecoin] during the time I was at Coinbase," he recalls, believing the decision was due to the nascent state of the market at the time.

Looking back, however, he says that litecoin "wasn’t ready" to grow, and that the most crucial thing he could do for the crypto ecosystem was to help bitcoin succeed.

"I thought the most important thing was to let people own bitcoin and hold bitcoin," he says.

The archenemy

But like all heroes, Lee was called into action by a foe, and in the world of bitcoin, there perhaps hadn’t been one more sinister than the technology’s struggle over its technical roadmap.

By the start of 2017, the fight that had split the developer community since 2015 had gone from bad to bleak. Almost daily, conspiracy theories seemed to emerge in which industry figures were accused of undermining the cryptocurrency for personal gain.

New funding was non-existent and development was languishing, with the market’s leading solution, a code update called Segregated Witness (SegWit), stuck in a political gridlock and unable to garner consensus.

A somewhat complex and poorly understood concept, SegWit required bitcoin users, businesses and miners to update their software to boost transaction capacity. And despite fits and starts toward approval (due to how the proposal was coded, it required a certain percentage of miners to lead the way in the software change), by the start of 2017, any consensus on the matter was beginning to seem unlikely.

"I saw bitcoin was having this scaling debate and there was all this FUD against SegWit, and I thought it was unfair and that I could do something about it," Lee recalls.

Step one in that pursuit was quitting Coinbase. What needed to happen next was more difficult – convincing the litecoin community that SegWit was "the path forward" that could boost its market and spark a revival. And there’s reason to believe the community was persuaded.

On the news that litecoin would push through the scaling proposal, the markets responded, breaking out of the sub-$5 doldrums the cryptocurrency had been locked in since 2014 and rising back to $50.

"People bought into that and traders bought into that," Lee says.

But despite the community buy-in, Lee wasn’t able to convince litecoin’s miners (many of whom were also large bitcoin miners) to embrace SegWit quite so easily. Most notably, the final agreement required what was effectively an eight-hour Skype call with litecoin's developers and miners.

But in the end, the tactics worked, and within a month litecoin’s code had upgraded to SegWit.

With great power…

But it’s what happened next that appears to have had the largest and most lasting effect on Lee.

With litecoin's efforts as an example, leading stakeholders soon sought to change bitcoin’s code through a similar effort, with investor Digital Currency Group gathering industry luminaries in New York to strike a deal. What emerged from the meeting of some 50 startups and miners was the controversial "New York Agreement," an attempt to strike a compromise that would both pass SegWit and upgrade the protocol to allow for 2 MB blocks.

What’s perhaps been undersold about the event, though, is how much it was modeled after Lee’s own approach to scaling litecoin, a fact that’s not lost on Lee given the results in both instances were far from analogous.

While litecoin’s meeting helped galvanize a small and growing community, the New York Agreement divided and angered bitcoin’s user base. The technology’s developers not only boycotted the proceedings, but soon began speaking out against its branding as a kind of coercion.

Like many other developers, Lee describes the attempt in retrospect as tone-deaf to the core philosophies of the bitcoin movement, even if it was well-intentioned.

"They did have a meeting with most of the miners and the businesses, but that is just kind of part of the community. A lot of users follow developers, since developers are doing the job of keeping the network secure and everything. So, it failed because of that," Lee says.

And as he did on Twitter, in interview, Lee advocates that the meeting exposed bitcoin to a new kind of attack vector, one that could be corrupted as the industry grows (and attracts even more powerful enemies).

"If governments can tell all the miners to change bitcoin into something different and that just works, then bitcoin is too fragile," he says.

A great responsibility

As a side effect, it appears Lee is now acutely aware of the impact of his work and words. Indeed, during the interview he routinely references past statements, seldom treading on new ground.

Sharpening his chopsticks in a nearby noodle shop, Lee admits he’s erred in judgment in his public statements in the past. He’s been thinking a lot as of late about one particular tweet. Made just before the news China's regulators had moved to take domestic exchanges offline, he quickly pulled a remark attesting it was true.

However, before the Chinese government made that news public, Lee’s statement led to a stir that some believe pushed down the bitcoin price.

"I was telling the truth, but the truth caused the market to correct. People found out the truth from me first, and they sold," he says. "A lot of people got hurt."

As the conversation continues, we settle into a somber pace.

Question. A pause. An answer. A drink of tea, the sound of a cup set down and onto the next. In between, Lee is as careful with his noodles (hovering them cautiously over his spoon before each bite) as he is with the conversation.

But when Lee finally asserts, the topic of choice is compelling – a recent Reddit post in which an unknown user told the story of a man who allegedly committed suicide after selling 10,000 bitcoin too early.

"That’s pretty sad," Lee says, and, while he’s not sure if it’s true, he seems to find a larger truth in what the story is seeking to convey.

Unlike past topics, he seems to linger on the point.

"I can totally see that though," he says. "You had, what, 10,000 bitcoin, and you just sold them for whatever reason. Now that’s like $100 million."

At first, I don’t think much of the remark, although later it occurs to me Lee is finally letting his guard down, at least providing the answer to a question that’s long plagued the interview – namely, why he’s so unwilling to break his constructed narrative.

The answer, revealed then, is that for Lee, cryptocurrency is a serious matter, an issue of life, liberty and death.

"It will always bug you, the fact that you had $100 million and you made the wrong move," he continues.

Higher calling

In no time at all, though, Lee is back at it again, this time in a Boost VC backroom that seems to double as part storage closet, part recording studio.

Like much of the Draper establishment, the room feels not unlike any friend’s basement you had in college, kegerator in the corner and the floor strewn with Nintendo cartridge games.

Now answering questions for a Boost VC podcast, Lee is back on script, with the conversation retreading again – Lee is concerned about ICO incentives; believes bitcoin is the most important cryptocurrency; and is overall optimistic about the state of the industry.

That said, the conversation isn't without its new moments. Of note is the tinge of nostalgia now that the bitcoin price is up above $10,000. Although, Draper does most of the talking on the subject.

"Five years ago that wouldn’t be a conversation, it was, 'My friends might be interested in purchasing some of this.' This conversation is being well received now, and it’s being had by every crypto person and high net worth person and presidents and prime ministers," Draper says.

"It’s fascinating," he continues, as Lee passed an opportunity for response.

Somehow even a conversation about superpowers doesn’t turn up much interest. Lee’s answer? The ability to go back in time to buy more bitcoin.

With the podcast wrapped, the conversation spills into the hall. Lee lingers with Draper, myself and our cameraman for a few moments, just long enough to seem polite.

We’re on the steps when he turns and declares, "I need to go now." Back sheathed in sunlight and heightened on the stairs, there’s a certainty gravity to the statement.

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is an independent media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. Interested in offering your expertise or insights to our reporting? Contact us at news@coindesk.com.